U.S. Law Enforcement Is Tracking Who Calls, Texts And Emails Whom More Often Than Ever Before

Law enforcement isn't just interested in what Americans are saying on the phone or on the Internet. They're also interested in whom they're saying it to--a piece of information that conveniently doesn't require a warrant to obtain. And according to newly released documents, the Feds are surveilling and mapping out those social connections more pervasively than ever before.

Documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union through a Freedom of Information Act Requirement and released Thursday show a massive spike in "non-content" surveillance by federal law enforcement over the last two years, jumping 60% from 23,535 cases in 2009 to 37,616 in 2011. Those "pen register" and "trap and trace" orders, which watch only who a surveillance target communicates with rather than the content of his or her communications and therefore don't require a warrant, were aimed at more than 80,000 Americans in 2011, a spike that means more Americans' communications were watched by this type of communication in the last two years than in the entire previous decade, according to the ACLU's count.

Indivduals affected by federal orders for non-content surveillance.

ACLU attorney Catherine Crump, who was involved in the FOIA lawsuit that forced the Department of Justice to turn over the new documents, argues that the skyrocketing numbers show that it's too easy for law enforcement to gain access to the non-content data, which only requires that a judge be shown the order is "relevant to a criminal investigation."

That warrantless data collection becomes especially sensitive in an age when mining of social connections can reveal highly personal information; The ACLU's blog post points to an MIT study that showed an analysis of a Facebook users' friends could reveal his or her sexual orientation.

"There's a perception that this information isn’t as sensitive as content. But a list of who someone communicates with can be quite revealing of their friends, associates, even religious counselors," says Crump. "It’s not the kind of information law enforcement should be getting without close supervision from a court."

According to official reports, the number of full wiretaps that do require a warrant dropped to 2,732 in 2011 compared with 3,194 the year before--only the fifth time in two decades that the number has dropped year over year.

But the ACLU's latest data release shows that those warrant-requiring wiretaps are dwarfed by the increase in warrantless surveillance. And in response to a letter from Congressman Ed Markey, cell carriers including Sprint, AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon released data in July that showed hundreds of thousands of law enforcement requests for their data.

More troubling still, says Crump, is just how hard the surveillance data was for the ACLU to obtain. Despite requirements that the warrantless surveillance orders be reported to Congress annually, Congress hasn't bothered to publish the data for the last two years. The ACLU instead was forced to file Freedom of Information Act requests for the data and then sue the Department of Justice in May to force it to comply.

Even the documents the ACLU has succeeded in publishing, Crump points out, only cover the Department of Justice. That means surveillance orders by the Secret Service, the Department of Homeland Security, and every state and local police force aren't included. In reports of wiretaps, those state-by-state orders often outnumber the federal surveillance cases.

The ACLU's latest release, in other words, only hints at the extent of law enforcement's ability to track phone and Internet users' social graphs. For now, we still don't know how much the government knows about who we know.